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My Proof

Highlander - I think everyone avoids the crypto forums; hence the few replies. This is a fairly well read thread but I'm sure not everyone acturally understands what the point of this DVD was. I sure didn't until I spent about 30 minutes browsing the entire website figuring it out.

For those of you who are wonder what this DVD is about, basically well before the rover went to mars a ton of people e-mailed saying they wanted their name on it. Then it was decided that this secret message would be printed on the outside of the DVD where it would have a picture taken on Mars (with the highest-res cam on Mar). It is an effort to gain public involvement in the thing, but they do a poor job of pointing that out. The page Highlander linked to assumed you understood the point of all of that. So for those of you who want to give it a try, go to the clues website, take a look at the pictures of the DVD and type it out in notepad. Look through all of the clues and when absolutely stumped, and you feel like it is impossible, look at the hidden posts here to get back on track. The message still hasn't been posted, and the point is to not post it but simply know what it is. It is cute, and you get a nice little certificate out of the deal that you can print out.

And speaking of printing it out...my trusty dot-matrix printer eXploded.
And my scanner...well...um...had a lot of light refraction...and created a negative image?
And for some reason...ummm...well...you can try to take a look at my certificate.

Anyways, it proves that I did solve it, and makes it impossible for anyone else to steal my image and photomanipulate it since I'm sure it is very, very, concidental that these events even happened in the first place...lol. Okay, so the story of the printer and everything was a joke. But anyways...

a couple of links and something

I found the page today when there were seven clues already. It was a fairly easy task to crack the code, just time consuming. It helps a bit if you have heard of the Huffman minimum redundancy code, which is a quite interesting algorithm. I figured that I could create a script to solve the code at least to get the decimal numbers and their frequencies but came to the conclusion that writing the program would take more time than creating a quick macro to cut the l--ll-ll---llll- series into groups of three and then search'n'replacing them with their decimal equivalents. Hey, eight search-and-replaces isn't a big job.

By the way, there's an error in one of the clues... Luckily it's not very fatal.

Cracked it too

I cracked it finally. Took me longer to get the joke than it took to decode it, I always ended up being the guy that laughes after everyone else starts to forget about the joke... How do I post my certificate up here? Anyone that wants to tell me just pm please.